Shows to watch on Midseason TV

It almost feels like fall again with so many TV shows, new and returning, on the horizon. Late winter and early spring yield a rich and eclectic crop of small-screen treats: science fiction dramas, crime thrillers, chilling tales of the supernatural, swashbuckling adventures, and comedies of the romantic and family kind. Here's what's coming your way.

This sounds like an American version of the French series “The Returned,” which bowed last fall on Sundance Channel. The setting here is a small town in Missouri, where residents are forever changed when loved ones, including an 8-year-old, return from the dead.

Six pals who are at different stages in their lives — married, divorced, newly engaged, single — constantly wonder if their friends have it better. Kevin Connolly, James Van Der Beek and Brooklyn Decker lead an attractive cast in this romantic comedy.

A futuristic romance blossoms between a pretty teenage girl (Aimee Teegarden, “Friday Night Lights”) and a hot alien boy (Matt Lanter) who was integrated into a suburban school with eight others of his kind 10 years after they hit Earth.

When nuclear war decimated planet Earth, the only survivors were the 400 inhabitants of 12 international space stations that were in orbit at the time. Nearly a century later, this “Ark” has become dangerously overpopulated and 100 of its juvenile delinquents are exiled to the Earth's surface to discover what parts are still habitable.

Twelve years after the Hugh Grant movie, Nick Hornby's comedic tale is freshened for TV by Jason Katims (“Friday Night Lights,” “Parenthood”). The previously unfettered life of a carefree bachelor (David Walton, “New Girl”) is disrupted by his new next-door neighbors: a needy single mom (Minnie Driver, “Good Will Hunting”) and her odd but engaging son, Marcus.

The Fisher family — consisting of a blind dad (J.K. Simmons), a mom who refuses to grow up (Jenna Elfman), their frustrated teenage daughter, 11-year-old son and a dog named Elvis — actually grows closer after divorce.

In this collaboration between J.J. Abrams (“Star Trek” and Alfonso Cuarón (“Gravity”), a 10-year-old girl (Johnny Sequoyah) with supernatural abilities teams up with an unlikely protector — a wrongly imprisoned death row inmate — and goes on the run to avoid sinister forces bent on using her gifts to control the world.

Fans of 007 should flock to this four-week thriller, which boasts the magical casting of Dominic Cooper as charming maverick Ian Fleming, whose life of peril and pleasure led to his creation of the most famous spy in modern literature.

“Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond” (9 p.m. Wednesdays, BBC... Photo-5729306.77821 - San Antonio Express-News

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“Red Road” (8 p.m. Thursdays, Sundance; Feb. 27):

This 10-episode crime thriller focuses on two very different men from wildly contrasting worlds — a dangerous member of an American Indian tribe (Jason Momoa, best known as Khal Drogo on “Game of Thrones”) and a beleaguered local cop (Martin Henderson) — who form an uneasy alliance.

Part-time Austinite Mike Judge (“Beavis and Butt-Head,” “King of the Hill”) is back to making us cringe and giggle with this irreverent live-action comedy about the world of dot-com millionaires and the geeky up-and-comers who struggle to succeed.

The chilling redo of V.C. Andrews' kids-in-peril novel — about a widowed mom (Heather Graham) who has so few options in the 1950s that she moves back into the mansion of her unhappy childhood and forces her four kids to put up with all kinds of indignities, including staying hidden in an attic for years — is even more disturbing than the 1987 film. Nobody does scary as well as Ellen Burstyn, who plays the kids' sadistic grandma.

This vintage Western miniseries, set in the late 19th century, follows a fortune-seeking college grad (Richard Madden of "Game of Thrones") and his pal, who hope to strike gold in Canada's treacherous Yukon territory.

Ken Burns, TV's most accomplished documentarian, returns with a 90-minute film that tells the story of Vermont's Greenwood School, where each year students are encouraged to practice and recite the Gettysburg Address. The film also unlocks the history, context and importance of that most powerful of speeches by President Lincoln.